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Month: May 2008

De Noorderlicht ontsnapt!

De Noorderlicht ontsnapt!

Here (as promised) is a series of photos showing how we broke the ice around the Noorderlicht in Templefjord. Although the ice was not much more than a meter thick it was quite an operation to carefully break the ice without damaging the Noorderlicht. The basic strategy was to make circuits around the Noorderlicht until a crack made by the KV Svalbard reached one side of the Noorderlicht. Then the process was repeated from the other side so that a circle of ice containing the Nooderlight was split in half and the ship was released. The operation was not all that easy with a ship as big as the KV Svalbard and took several hours. At one point a big piece of ice collided with the Noorderlichts rudder and threatened disaster – this is why the Noorderlichts crew are desperately trying to look under her stern in one picture! Fortunately the rudder was quickly repaired and all ended well.

The last image shows Barentsburg as seen from the KV Svalbard when we steamed past it this evening!

Right, it’s late and the first day of Leg Two starts tomorrow so this is all for now…

Paul

Svalbard

Svalbard

I’ve just come back from a great couple of days in Svalbard! I arrived late on Thursday night. While the plane landed, I could see the KV Svalbard (Paul’s ship) coming in to Longyearbyen. I managed to get a free taxi ride from someone and I arrived at the ship while they were still securing the gangplank – good timing! I wasn’t sure if I would be allowed on board (it’s an army ship after all), but one of the coastguard guys asked me: “Would you like to come on board? Shall I take your bag?” Wow, everyone was so friendly! And it was great to be reunited with Paul of course 🙂

Longyearbyen is quite a special place. It’s changing from a community based on mining to one based on tourism. It was still very much winter there, and everybody moves around on snowmobiles. The first day was extremely windy (with lots of blowing snow) but we were lucky with the weather during the rest of the days – very sunny! (And very light, the midnight sun arrives in mid April here) Here are some photos of the town itself…

On Saturday the coastguard guys had organized a snow scooter tour. I shared a scooter with Paul, and spent most of the trip sitting on the back seat. Sounds like fun, but actually it’s very bumpy at the back and you have to hold on tight. My arm muscles were hurting the next day! Here’s a photo of the queue for the petrol station and us on the scooter – you have to wear a special suit, boots, and a helmet, like on a motorbike really.

The trip was very long – 120 km one way! We went through beautiful valleys, crossed the sea ice (with many seals lazing around) and spectacular glaciers… I often wished I had a camera on my helmet! We didn’t make many photo stops unfortunately. We were with a big group (I think about 14 snowmobiles) and most of them were 19-20 year olds (doing their army survice) who were constantly racing each other. The scooters can go really fast, on flat bits of sea ice we went about 120 km/hr!

These photos are of our final destination: Pyramiden, a Russian mining town abandoned in 1998. It’s bizarre to wonder through such a ghost town – there are still flower pots behind the windows and we found a workshop full of skates, bicycles and wooden ski’s. We could have spent a lot more time there but after a quick lunch (including hot dogs – Norwegians are truly obsessed with hot dogs!!) it was time to head back. In the last picture you can see the world’s northernmost Lenin statue…

We took the same route back, and this time we did have a photo stop at a ship stuck in the ice. The ship is called Noorderlicht – it’s a beautiful Dutch sailing ship. They freeze it into the ice on purpose and it’s used as a hotel and a basecamp for exploring Svalbard. It won’t be frozen in for much longer though, Paul’s ship is going to take it out of the ice tonight or tomorrow!

Just before coming back to Longyearbyen, we decided for a little detour to the top of a mountain that overlooks Longyearbyen and the bay. The view was amazing! The sun was shining through holes in the clouds and made bright spots on the sea surface – very spectacular!

It was quite a long and tiring day (250 km in total!), so on Sunday we had a rest day. We slept a lot, and then walked around Longyearbyen for a bit. There was not a lot to see though, everything is closed on Sundays.

On Monday it was time for some action, and we decided to rent a snowmobile again. We also had to rent a gun for protection against polar bears! It was a beautiful day, and we took our time to enjoy the landscape. This time I drove a lot as well, good fun!! I was a bit scared at first but once you get the hang of driving it’s a lot of fun, and a lot more comfortable than sitting on the back of the scooter 😉

We went through such beautiful landscapes, mostly very big and empty, though we did pass some huts and even another abandoned Russian mining settlement (a very small one though). We also drove close to the beach, and with the sunny weather and the very salty smell you would almost be tempted to try the water 😉

Our destination that day was the Russian mining town Barentsburg (once owned by the Dutch, hence the name). This is a working mining town! It was very bizarre to suddenly be in Russia – Paul even got a “welcome to Russia” text on his mobile. The town looks quite grim, though the houses are quite colorful and there are many murals. The people were very friendly though, we even got a tour of some science labs from a Russian researcher who was based there for a few weeks.

Things you can do only in Svalbard: walk around town with a gun on your back… We didn’t actually see any polar bears, just lots of reindeer (and I’m glad about that!). We also found this hovercraft lying around… how bizarre!

Another view of the town and me eating my sandwiches on some kind of boulevard place…

Barentsburg is only about 55 km from Longyearbyen, it took us about 3 hours each way, including many stops. A really nice trip! Renting a snowmobile is quite expensive, but it was really worth it.

I flew back to Tromso this afternoon, and Paul is now back on the ship for another 3 weeks. I hope he gets some good pictures of freeing the Dutch ship from the ice! I was hoping to come back to a green Tromso (last week almost all the snow had gone), but it has been snowing again!

End of leg 1

End of leg 1

After a few days of quite hard work, yesterday provided a welcome opportunity to relax. The ship moored to an ice floe where it stayed for two days while the oceanographers continued to explore Eastwards by helicopter and the sea-ice people and the biologists studied the ice floe the ship was moored to and the things living underneath it. As there is only space for three people in the helicopter I reluctantly stayed behind on the ship (it was a stunning day for flying.).

Even worse, as one of our instruments only works with my laptop and not anyone else’s I had to let the helicopterists take my laptop with them. Without a computer I couldn’t do much more than label and organise sample bottles for leg 2, but that was actually not such a small task.

Anyway, I had the opportunity to soak just a few rays in a corner sheltered from the wind at lunchtime. It’s pretty rare to have more than a few minutes of free time even when spending two months on a research ship as there’s almost always something that needs to be done.

And, no sooner had I sat down on the deck than a message crackled over the radio by my side: “Bridge to ice … there’s polar bear about 300m away. Can you see it?” I recognise Steve’s voice on a distant walkie-talkie: “Errrm, no there’s lots of ridges. Perhaps we should come back to the ship?”, “Ummm… yes. Perhaps you should. out.”

We were under siege again (excellent!). In the photos you can see the bear approaching. As the beast was heading vaguely towards the gangplank the bridge tried to scare it with the ship’s horn (which is truly deafening) but the bear responded with an expression that looked more like anger than fear and sank its teeth a little deeper into one of the biologist’s mooring buoys! This float is nearly a meter in diameter and I was pretty amazed the bear could open it’s jaws wide enough to bite into the curved surface, but that didn’t appear to be a problem! After a while the bear wandered a little further away and then nonchalantly swam across the wake of open water that the ship left as it broke the ice on the way here! Apparently polar bears don’t think twice about a quick dip in -2 degree water.

The good weather lasted until late in the evening and yesterday ended in a spectacular sun-almost-set with a thin fog developing over the ice.

This morning the this fog was still hanging over the ice seemingly just a few meters deep, so I hurriedly donned my flying suit and packed a lunch box. Sadly two hours later the fog had still failed to burn off, and the conditions were changing from just-not-quite-good enough-weather to plain old bad weather, so after lunch I accepted I’d probably flown for the last time on this leg and hung my suit up in the hanger. Around dinner time though things began to improve and it looked like my flying sandwiches wouldn’t suffer the indignity of being eaten at the dinner table after all :). So got dressed again, jumped into the helicopter and made a bee-line for our last planned station. It was quite a nice flight over huge areas of dark nilus ice that’s almost clear enough to see through, but before we reached our station the windscreen (is that the right term?) began to frost over! so we rapidly descended to a low altitude and re-traced our bee-line back to the ship. We’d measured everything we wanted except for these last two stations. As the helicopter touched down we decided it was probably best to call an end to leg 1.

As I write this the ship is extracting itself from the ice flow we were moored to (no dynamite this time) and turning the sharp end to point at Longyearbyen. We should arrive in about two days, at which point I’ll be reunited with Hanneke, who is currently sitting in a plane heading to Tromsø.